From Targets to Transition Plans – Making Climate Ambition Deliverable

Climate leadership is moving from target-setting to delivery. This article explains why climate transition plans are becoming central to corporate climate strategy, how SBTi 2.0 and ISO 14060 reinforce this shift, and why capital allocation, value chain collaboration and governance will define their next phase.

1. Corporate climate action is entering the delivery phase

Over the past few decades, corporate sustainability has moved in waves, each one testing the resolve and resourcefulness of organizations, particularly those seeking to lead on climate action. While climate disclosure and commitments are now mainstream corporate practice, companies are increasingly expected to show how their climate ambition will be delivered in practice.

The earliest phase of corporate climate leadership started with greenhouse gas measurement, as companies began to understand and quantify their carbon emissions. Reporting greenhouse gas emissions vastly improved through increasingly robust and standardized accounting frameworks, such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and ISO 14064, and relying on platforms, such as CDP, for public disclosure. As of 2025, disclosure rates for Scope 1 and Scope 2 GHG emissions of S&P 500 companies had reached over 88%, while Scope 3 disclosures had improved to 69.5%¹, even though data quality for Scope 3 continues to be a complex issue.

The next phase focused on reducing emissions. As companies began to address their climate impacts, early efforts were marked by inconsistent methodologies, credibility gaps and overreliance on compensation. Over time, the ecosystem (largely through the Science Based Targets initiative) established common, trusted benchmarks for ambition. As of April 2026, nearly eleven thousand companies have set targets aligned with the goals of the Paris Agreement².

But the success of SBTi also exposed the elephant in the corporate climate action room: target ambition becomes an empty concept without credible implementation.

This brings organizations to another phase focused on “delivery credibility”, where the central question is no longer whether companies have set ambitious targets, but whether those companies are serious about achieving their targets and disclosing how their decarbonization efforts address climate-related financial risks.

This latest phase is being driven by a combination of forces. On the one hand, regulatory requirements and stakeholder expectations are increasing in scope and sophistication. On the other hand, market dynamics are pushing companies toward greater value chain collaboration, as managing transition and physical risks, and building resilience, become strategic priorities.

As a result, climate leadership is increasingly defined by the ability to translate those ambitious commitments into credible delivery pathways. And the climate ecosystem is moving quickly in this direction: in 2025 24.4% of S&P 500 companies had already publicly disclosed a transition plan outlining intended actions to achieve their climate goals¹.

2. The Case for Implementation Credibility

It is not surprising that several companies joined the science-based target-setting wave without fully understanding the breadth of that commitment, while others remain hesitant because of concerns they would not be able to meet expected reductions. Delivering on climate targets requires companies to make difficult strategic decisions around capital allocation, technology pathways, product and portfolio transformation, governance and oversight, and increasingly, value chain collaboration

This means that climate strategies must migrate from the sustainability function into the core operating model of the company, which is why climate transition plans (also referred to as net-zero roadmaps) have become critical.

As net-zero targets became more widespread across both governments and private-sector actors, transition plans have moved into the spotlight. Emerging regulatory frameworks such as the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, Switzerland’s Climate Protection Ordinance and California’s SB 261 are increasingly requiring companies to disclose climate-related risks, opportunities and transition strategies, reinforcing expectations around accountability and transparency.

In practice, credible transition plans go beyond emissions targets and into the operational and strategic shifts required to align business with a low-carbon economy, including investment priorities, technology choices and value chain engagement.

Yet, while many companies have made significant progress in setting targets, far fewer have developed transition plans that are sufficiently detailed, internally aligned and truly resilient to realworld constraints to withstand uncertainty, dependencies and execution risk.

For keeping alive Net Zero expectations, transition planning must become a core instrument of corporate climate strategy and the primary lens through which climate credibility will be assessed in the next decade.

3. From Frameworks to Systems: SBTi and ISO in Context

This shift toward delivery credibility can be seen in the evolution of the major frameworks currently shaping corporate climate action.

Frameworks such as SBTi 2.0 and the upcoming ISO Net-Zero Standard (ISO 14060) increasingly recognize that setting targets is only one part of the challenge. For both, the focus is expanding outside of ambition or accounting requirements and into credible and actionable transition plans.

While both standards address net-zero transition, with ongoing efforts at ensuring a sufficient level of interoperability, each one will present distinct advantages and complexities for organizations:

SBTi 2.0 continues to play a central role in defining the level of ambition, and in developing comprehensive criteria and methods to ensure that corporate targets remain aligned with climate science and global decarbonization pathways.
ISO 14060 also defines net-zero ambition and target setting methods, adding a layer of considerations on management systems, governance and implementation structures required to operationalize that ambition.

In this context, established management system standards such as ISO 14001 can provide a critical foundation, offering processes, controls and continuous improvement mechanisms that allow climate targets and transition plans to be embedded into day-to-day operations.

Companies should avoid assessing which framework is more stringent or more widely recognized and instead consider which framework can better help them build a credible bridge between ambition and implementation. Ultimately, regardless of the framework applied, companies face the same task: translating targets into operational roadmaps that guide investment decisions, technology choices and value chain transformation.

We can continue to rely on target-setting frameworks to set the direction of travel, but they do not, on their own, ensure that the journey and destination are feasible.

4. What Makes a Credible Transition Plan

Even as net-zero targets remain important (and it’ll remain key to select a target setting framework that is compatible with a company’s strategy), companies still need to build credible and actionable transition plans to identify priorities and capitalize on opportunities to collaborate, share and jointly solve their Net Zero delivery challenge.

As a result, the next generation of transition plans will need to go well beyond high-level commitments and provide clear answers to fundamentally operational questions:

What technologies will enable the transition?
What investments are required, and when?
How will suppliers and customers be engaged?
How will progress be measured, managed and corrected over time?
Who is accountable for delivery across the organization?

Growing from Target Setting to Execution Design.

A growing number of frameworks, notably the UK Transition Plan Taskforce (TPT), now address climate transition planning. These frameworks may differ in terminology and level of detail, but all require building transition plans through a structured process that connects strategic intent with operational delivery.

At a high level, building a credible transition plan involves:

Defining a strategic and methodological blueprint, establishing boundaries, standards and guiding principles.
Validating baselines and assessing readiness, consolidating emissions data and identifying constraints, gaps and opportunities.
Defining target architecture and transition pathways, translating ambition into structured targets, milestones and realistic scenarios.
Translating pathways into a transformation roadmap, linking emissions reductions to concrete actions, investments and business decisions.
Embedding the transition into the organization, through governance, performance metrics and continuous monitoring.

However, following a structured process may not be sufficient, since many transition plans today are internally consistent, ambitious and, unfortunately, also fragile. They can rely on optimistic assumptions about technology availability, policy developments, market dynamics or value chain engagement.

What distinguishes more advanced transition plans is that they are both comprehensive and robust under real-world conditions. Therefore, applying stress testing and a “failure mode” lens can help reveal critical vulnerabilities and allow companies flexibility to adapt to changing conditions instead of betting their climate strategy on best-case scenarios.

5. Considerations on climate leadership for 2026

As organizations change their focus from target setting to execution, a new set of challenges emerges that cannot be addressed through frameworks or methodologies alone. These challenges require near-term changes to how companies make decisions, allocate capital and collaborate across value chains.

For companies embarking on climate transition planning, here are three key immediate considerations:

I. Climate strategy is becoming capital strategy

For many years, climate commitments were largely relegated to sustainability strategies, but transition planning is changing that by requiring companies to make fundamental decisions about capital allocation, asset portfolios, technology investments and long-term competitiveness.

Companies should ensure that their climate transition plans connect to capital expenditure planning, financial disclosures and corporate risk management.

II. Value chain decarbonization goes from a GHG accounting problem to a collaboration problem

Most corporate emissions sit in the value chain. Yet reducing these emissions cannot be solved through more accurate inventories alone, since it requires:

supplier collaboration
sector-wide initiatives
product redesign (and in some cases, entirely new business models)

Going forward, the real challenge of Scope 3 will be less about inventory accuracy and more about coordination across complex value chains. Companies must move beyond inventory management toward actively shaping their value chains through supplier (and/or customer) engagement, partnerships and industry-wide collaboration.

III. Frameworks will converge but strategic judgment is needed to make the difference

Standards and frameworks (both voluntary and regulatory) will continue to evolve and gradually converge. However, transition planning requires decisions that cannot always be fully standardized.

Companies must make judgment calls on questions such as:

Which technologies will realistically scale?
How fast can value chains decarbonize?
What role should carbon markets play?
How to manage uncertainty in transition pathways?

Even with stronger climate transition plan (CTP) frameworks, these choices remain inherently uncertain. Ultimately, what will help companies succeed with their transition plans is the ability to make sound judgement calls and translate ambition into investment decisions, operational trade-offs and adaptive strategies, thereby allowing them to become more agile.

What to Do Now?

Companies preparing for the next phase of climate leadership can take three practical steps to strengthen credibility in 2026: test whether current reduction targets are matched by a real delivery plan; identify the main assumptions and dependencies behind that plan; and check whether finance, procurement and operations are involved early enough to influence decisions. We would be happy to help you tackle this challenge.

¹ UCLA. The State of Corporate Sustainability Disclosure 2025.
² SBTi